Observations focused on the problems of an underdeveloped country, Venezuela, with some serendipity about the world (orchids, techs, science, investments, politics) at large. A famous Venezuelan, Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo, referred to oil as the devil's excrement. For countries, easy wealth appears indeed to be the sure path to failure. Venezuela might be a clear example of that.

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What Capriles Wants From The CNE

April 24, 2013

In this video, Roberto Picón, in charge of the technical challenge to the vote, explains what it is the Capriles command wants from the CNE to do the complete and real audit and cross correlation of all the information on April 14th. .

He says:

We don’t need the automated part, the ballots, the tallies, the tallies of the audit and the totals. Those are automatically produced. Thus, they will coincide with the CD, except for the variations in the tallies.

But we also need:

-Complete access to the voting notebooks.

Capriles wants to know who voted, if dead people voted, if people with the same name voted, we want to know if the same person signed that they voted or used the same fingerprint.

Capriles also wants to know the cases in which the fingerprint machine was activated by a fingerprint that did not match. Is this random or is this in particular poll stations?

Capriles wants to know what happens when the 1.5 million people who did not have fingerprints in the system voted. Was this randomly distributed or not? Did they go against Capriles?

Capriles wants to know if each fingerprint is compared to all the 15 million voters. Did people vote more than once? This comparison has to start now.

Capriles wants to know: When there is a match, what is the maximum tolerance of the system? If there is no match, the machine should shut down after 7 tries. When this happens, CNE has to liberate the machine. How many times did this happen? Was the password used systematically? Was this random, sequential?

Finally, Capriles wants it certified that this happened at the time of the vote and it was not altered afterwards. This can be done securely. There is a digital certificate for this.

We believe, said Picón, that people that should not have voted, voted and Capriles would have won without them. Thus, we are asking for all of this information.

And here is the former head of the CNE saying exactly the opposite of what they are saying now when the opposition said it would destroy its notebooks from its primaries, something all candidates agreed to. All he talks about is how important and significant the notebooks are…

And we already have the answer, CNE says no complete audit, recount whatever you want to call it. The same group that violated the law by not allowing 140,000 new voters to register since October as mandate by the law and shut down the Colombian border two days ahead of time, blocking 160,000 voters from coming to vote. The same group that allowed Maduro to campaign day after day, for Chavismo to campaign after it was not allowed by law.

No, the point is when the poll closes, even if at the right time, the vote does not stop, the people inside continue “voting”.

if you graph abstention from the most anti-Chavez to the most pro-Chavez in some elections (have not seen it for this one) abstention increases smoothly and then in the most pro-Chavez, with few proChavez witnesses, it drops drastically, for example. And yes, 10% of the poling stations, about 2 million votes, have 90%+ Maduro votes, including about 1% 99-100% polling stations.

By now you may want to say what you want, but Maduro promised the audit to Unasur, so they would recognize him, he said he would do it the first day, then backtracked. Even pro-Chavez Governments are not stupid. If he does not do it for whatever reason, it will make him weaker, nationally and internationally.

You have to understand, his enemy is not Capriles, his enemies are in his party, among those that believe Chavez should have named them and Maduro is not one of them. Maduro is not considered to e one of the original Bolvarians, they will not rest until they get rid of him.

About the MUD, they are not the amateurs that you believe.The same team , very qualified people, has now done the statistics and projecting for four elections. The other three with more than 70-80% of the actas, the largest error was less than 0.33 %, which happened at a Gubernatorial race. And all of a sudden, they have 1.5% with 90%, yeah, sure.

Sorry Moctavio, but I cannot see a reply link below your last comment so I will have to do a new one.

If your scenario actually happened then there will be lots of polling stations with or close to 100% turnout. Also if this closing of the polling station happened before the time it was supposed to, then wouldn’t any real voters who turned later would be surprised to find it shut.

Also if this had happened the intimidated MUD witness would report it and the station would’ve reported an obviously skewed result.

Though I agree that election bodies should be non-partisan, a politician running an election doesn’t seem to have been a problem in the USA. For example Katherine Harris in Florida 2000 and Ken Blackwell in Ohio 2004 were not only in charge of the voting in those states, they also were co-chairs of Bush’s campaign in those states.

If you could read you will see my name is neither Hilton or Perez. I was tempted to stop reading when I got to “The biometric machines are subliminally implied to know who you vote for.”

Well if the Venezuela military worked for someone other than the Venezuelan government then you would be worried.

The private media more than balances out the state broadcaster as it has less than 10% share. The printed press can put pictures of Maduro looking like Hitler on its front page and pictures of ballots being burnt from previous elections and make out they are from the current one.

There will be no recount as a) vote counting is automated and b) the margin is not close enough to warrant one.

Hilton: I dont know if your name is Perez or Hilton, but I really find all your comments somewhat out of touch or very naive. You have a Government that uses ALL of its resources in the election. That means, the party PSUV and the Government are no different. The equivalent of your BBC broadcasts minutes of Capriles and hours of Chavez/Maduro daily. The biometric machines are subliminally implied to know who you vote for. The media is 90% controlled and/or intimidated. The Electoral Board is controlled by the Government. The military works for the Government and its voters. There is no transparency. The rules are not complied with. Even the Head of the Supreme Court denies the possibility of a recount. The judicial system is controlled by the Government. The Government has so far refused to do the recount and you still give them the benefit of the doubt.

It is a miracle that the vote was so tight (By that I mean the real vote, not the CNE count)

Understand: there will be no recount. Period. Moctavio said it the first day when PSF’s started questioning what he was saying. This is still true 14 days later, there is no intention of doing anything which may unmask the fraud.

The 46% Which is not 46% was decided unilitarally by the 4 ladies of CNE, Capriles accepted it because he understood it was the full audit requested forthose and it would reveal the fraud. No sooner had they said it, they backtracked and the audit has yet to be started.

You keepbelieving their crap, but the only truth is that the audit that was to start Monday has yet to be started and ypu dont ask yourself why.

Again PLEASE read the electoral lawand the reasons for nullifying an ele tion which is the basis for Capriles’ request, if you can notdo an audit that allows you to check what can nullify an election, what is the point?

Because the CNE is the legal electoral authority, not Capriles. I still don’t see how he will find fraud in documents his officials signed off against on election day. Remember this is what Capriles said after the CNE announcement:

Capriles explained that the announced audit of 46% of the remaining ballots represents 12,000 ballot boxes approximately. “Irregularities will be found in those 12,000 boxes,” he noted.

But surely he has now realised now that he was kidding himself there as none were found in the 54% random sample. Obviously the 46% is the remaining polling stations. Not some made up figure from the CNE.

The CNE hasn’t announced yet when it is going to begin the audit. I can only guess that it is requiring more organisation and human resource than they originally expected it would.

OK so are you saying he is wanting to annul the whole election or just at certain polling stations?

I think you write a lot and read very little. An audit includes all of the info. If you stuff a box with fake ballots, the notebook has to agree, that is, the number of people who used their fingerprint in the notebook, signed it and voted has to coincide. And of course, the fingerprints have to be different, if they are there at all.

No, the law says that anywhere you can prove there is an inconsistency, you can nullify the result and the vote has to be redone. Of course, this makes no sense, if you only find something that is 1,000 votes in what is claimed to be a 220,000 vote difference. The inconsistencies have to be significant.

You keep grabbing at what someone may have said or not. Venezuela is a very legalistic country. In order to request the audit, you have to write a very long legal document, citing the electoral law, what it says and what has been done in the past. That is all that matters. In that document, Capriles’ command asked for an audit that reviews all of the items that the law says would represent an inconsistency. I have given you the link where all of that is, every single one of those things has been requested.

The CNE last Sunday said the audit would begin at noon last Monday Monday.

The political problem associated with checking only 12,000 boxes (which is not 46% of the vote BTW) is that, what happens if the inconsistencies involve 100,000 votes? That would require auditing all of the remainder, as the % would suggest the possibility of a 200,000 “difference”.

What happens then? To begin with, Maduro’s Presidency would be on very weak ground until the whole thing is checked. And even if the “inconsistencies” are only 100,000 votes in the end, it would show there was fraud.

So in a hypothetical polling station where Maduro received 300 votes and Capriles 200 (and no votes for the other candidates and no null votes), but the notebook only has 499 voters signatures and thumb prints should all 500 votes be annulled? The missing signature could simply be because a voter walked out of the polling station after putting his receipt in the box. If it was annulled then this would be denying at the 499 voters that voted according to the rules their franchise.

What stops ballot stuffing is not the notebooks being filled in, but the biometric fingerprint reader and the identity card.

The election process in Venezuela is vastly superior to what we have here in the UK. Here the a polling card is sent to each voter’s home address about 3 weeks before the election and you take that with you to the polling station (though you don’t have to). You then confirm your name and address, they mark the register that you have voted and then you put the cross on the paper and put it in the ballot box. I could simply take my brother’s card and pretend to be him and vote. But I cannot take his thumb with me.

Committing fraud in an election is not easy and requires a great deal of prior organisation to make sure the fraud was evenly spread and less noticeable.

In the end, the problem is intimidation of witnesses. This allows people to vote for those that did not show up at the end of the day. If everyone in your polling station belongs to your party, you close the door and you allow voting for those that did not show up. There is no need for the biometric step and who cares about the notebook.

Automated system are as good or as bad as the people running them. When those running the voting system belong to the Government’s party, it is hard to get a fair election. Jorge Rodriguez was head of the Electoral Board when the current system was set up. He was supposed to be “independent”. From that position, he went on to become Vice President under Chavez.

Mick,
“On another note, I find it funny that the idiots say the US is trying to steal Venezuela’s oil. The US is paying top dollar for that oil. It is the countries that are supporting Maduro who are getting extremely discounted oil. Who is the real enemy?”

Great point. Again Chavismo is trying to paint its own illegal actions onto the opposition. Cuba and China are the big thieves of Vzla petroleum.

Any way you slice it, in politics, it is all about gaining the favor of the electorate. Either you look good or the other guy looks bad. Right now, Caprilles is doing a good job of looking like he has been cheated. He has presented a lot of reasonable questions, knowing they cannot answer them without incriminating themselves. He also knows the middle class Venezuelans care that some very important countries are not going along with the farce.

On another note, I find it funny that the idiots say the US is trying to steal Venezuela’s oil. The US is paying top dollar for that oil. It is the countries that are supporting Maduro who are getting extremely discounted oil. Who is the real enemy?

It took a while for Henrique to understand that auditing the physical ballots vs the tally is worthless and a waste of time. Only someone wishing to get caught with fraud would actually stuff votes into a box.

Then there is the issue about Smartmatic´s system and all sorts of people commenting that it is the vehicle the government employs for cheating. The MUD literally has never mentioned that the tallies don’t sum up to CNE’s final results. It´s pretty much understood that, although the system is ideal for twisting numbers around, the aleatory audit of 53% of boxes literally leaves “numerical” fraud out of the question.

So where is the fraud? Precisely, in the events that Henrique has explained in detail, which occurred prior to totalization.

And even though he pretty much had al the evidence in place last week, he still focused on counting ballot by ballot and really never spoke about the electoral notebooks. So it seems his advisors had to sit him down to finally make him understand that the fraud was precisely in the events, not in the numbers nor the ballots and it all could be proven by scanning the electroal notebooks.

So CNE -making the best of Capriles’s confusion- granted his wishes and accepted auditing the results with the condition that the notebooks would only be superficially scanned. When Henrique finally understood the relevance of reviewing signatures and fingerprints, a whole week was literally lost.

In the end what makes the fraud successful is that the means through which it’s executed and the way it can be proved are much more complicated than it seems to any regular being. Even the Oppostion candidate had difficulty grasping it.

So Capriles rejects the audit and is going to court to demand new elections. Will he get any traction? Meanwhie Maduro orders arrest of a gringo sent by Obama to finance terrorism against the government. They ain’t wasting no time on cubanization.

No one who knows Venezuela thinks that the Supreme Court (TSJ) is going to rule in his favor, even if Capriles had rock solid proof of fraud and had the people committing the fraud testify under oath that they did commit fraud.

Now, one of two things can happen:

1) By some miracle, the TSJ rules in Capriles’ favor and either a whole new election ensues, or certain voting centers/tables are selected for a re-vote. Chances of a nationwide election do over? Snowball, meet hell.
Chances of a partial re-vote in enough centers to affect the outcome? Fart, meet Hurricane.

2) TSJ rules as expected, that is, against Capriles. Chances of that happening? 99.9999999999999999999997314592%

So if the TSJ rules the way I think it will, the only option Capriles has is to take his case to international instances, and good luck with that.

The wildcard no one is talking about, yet?

The part of the military that wants the rule of law to win. If it is proven in the court of public opinion that the election was rigged, and if that proof is verifiable and easy to understand, then we could see some interesting times in which anything, literally, can happen.

No. He requested a complete audit (ballots, books, fingerprints, signatures, ID numebrs, etc.). It was the CNE that said they were going to check on part of the remainning 46%. They said they were going to check 400 boxes per day for 3 periods of 10 days. That’s 12.000 boxes which actually make about 30% of the total, not the 46%. Also, they said it was going to be “next week”, which is the one that just ran out, so, yes, someone (the CNE) is blocking it.

Look at page 12 on, all of the reasons that nullify an election. If you can not see those reasons, what is the point of the law.

Similarly,I have heard people saying why is Capriles now asking for the proof that no fingerprint was duplicated and the statistics on fingerprint errors. This is taken from a press release of the CNE:

What Capriles is asking for may be unpopular and “fastidioso”, but it’s also right on. I posted an article last week about UNASUR observers actually witnessing at a voting center in Santa Rosa de Lima, that people could use their fingerprint with someone else’s cedula and it would activate the voting machine for them to vote. They checked every table in the center and every table presented the same glitch. In other words, the fingerprint machine is nothing but a gimmick to give the appearance of security but is completely worthless.

This is how you can have a guy with 100 fake cedulas go and vote for each cedula using his fingerprint every time to activate the machines. It represent a complete failure in the system.

So, Capriles is right on in asking to check this information as it will reveal a massive failure in the integrity of the system.

How many people on the 14th were turned away by the crowds outside that were trying to enter with a handfull of cedulas? How may of those guys went in without resistance and voted multiple times? How can one person vote for a handfull of cedulas if the fingerprint machines work correctly?

What Capriles is asking here will takes months of work. It simply isn’t feasible or pointless. E.g “if people with the same name voted” I would’ve thought that 95%+ of the voters has another voter with the same name. Silly.

Both the CNE and he know that the audit of the remaining 46% of ballot boxes will not alter the result. This is simply because the already audit random sample of 54% had no discrepancies.

Well the 54% one just done didn’t turn up any “dirt”. Even if there were a few discrepancies caused by a faulty machine then it is not going to be enough to overturn 270,000 margin. Or even a 200,000 one. The Florida election in 2000 was 200 times closer than this one and that didn’t have a full audit or recount. The 2006 Mexican election was three times as close and the US didn’t insist on a full recount there.

You can’t impugn without the audit, precisely because the audit, or, rather, the results of the audit, is what’s gonna give you the basis for the impugnation. He’s just asking for the CNE to do what it is mandated by law (the so called “cold audit”), which was done before on a regular basis but, strangely, hasn’t happened since Carrasquero was part of the CNE and onwards.

I was tired of asking things like these in October. Particularly the register of people voting although the machine did not recognize de fingerprint. Nobody, including Miguel Octavio gave me an answer. I know that there are world contests for fingerprint recognition, that the task is hard for big databases. The systems that win contests are trained for days before the testing and error could be close to 1% which is high for a 15 million voters. Well, at least now I see some interest.

Capriles request for an audit attains many purposes
1. Most critical is that the vote count could change the election outcome.
2. Makes commandante presidente Maduro illegitimate irregardless of what the CNE, AN, and courts dictate.
3. Gives Capriles the moral leadership of Venezuela–it ain’t Maduro
4. Shows the desperation and guilt of Chavistas when they refuse an audit and begin threats, lies, violence, and job termination against the opposition
5. Shows that Chavistas have committed fraud.
6. Gives notice that fraud will not be tolerated in future elections
7. Keeps Capriles in the spotlight.
8. Keeps the Venezuela election in the international news and blogs.

The opposition received 52% of the votes in the last National Assembly election but did not get a majority of the seats.
Now, it appears that the opposition may have been cheated out of a presidency also.

You can question the results from every vote since 2004. The nut to crack right now is the CNE and the voting process. If you can crack that and see what is inside, I believe many will be surprised of the ability to manipulate the vote under the guise of an accurate and fair democratic process. Just like the purple pinky mentioned above which only applies to honest voters, and to stations that are not encouraging you to vote multiple times instead of trying to prevent it.

If the CNE were neutral, and the stations were neutral, and violation attemps were stopped instead of encouraged, we wouldn’t be discussing this now.

I am just so f’n tired of chavistas getting there way by threatening people. I can understand to a degree people who will act a certain way for monetary gain. But when people are forced to support, march, vote and accept one small groups ideology for no gain, only out of fear of losing a job, house, or imprisonment then it has to be stopped. It is time to remove these bullies from the playground.

There were almost 40,000 voting machines. It would only take 7 bad votes each (either for or against) to change the election. Everybody knows Castro has no problem with cheating, stealing, and lying, so it didn’t take much to steal the election.

The fact that 45% of the electorate was willing to tell a pollster that they would vote against Chavism, even with all the fear of repercussions, means that far more than half of Venezuela voted for change.

Wow! I’d like to thank you for posting the precise demands of the Capriles camp. Every journalist covering this story should pick-up on it. Is this unreasonable? Of course not. It is demanding simple transparency.

So now Capriles is hoping to prove that he won by showing that dead people voted or that people without fingerprints voted multiple times?
What happened with the actual counts of the votes that “supposedly” showed that Capriles won the election?

This voting is a complex issue. Capriles has inside knowledge. He knows exactly what he is doing. Like the great New York Knicks guard Walt Frazier did to his opponents, Capriles gave Maduro some room at the beginning. Little by little he is tightening his defense, and soon poor Maduro will be smothered.

Stuart you can characterize what Capriles is doing any way you want, you may even compare him with Lew Alcindor if you want but the fact is that a week ago he was demanding a recount and saying he had proof that the numbers published by the CNE were wrong and now he is saying … hmmm well hmmm lets see how many dead people voted because that is why we lost.
Oh also don’t forget the fingerprints, ahh .. ok … let see how the matching algorithm of the fingerprints works and what the tolerance is.

That is what I call a fishing expedition. Bottom line: he has diddly squat.

Please don’t misunderstand I voted for Capriles and never ever voted for Chavez so this is not a pro Maduro post but simply a statement of fact that this issue is going nowhere and will slowly slip out of mind as new crisis arise.

And this -in my opinion- is not a bad thing. Let Maduro deal with the mess chavismo created.

Just repeating “he knows what he is doing” or “he doesn’t want to show his cards” is just a wish not a fact. It is almost delusional.

Let’s take “he doesn’t want to show his cards”. OK then why is this guy saying they want to look at the fingerprint machines and looking at dead people voting, isn’t that showing his cards? or do you think that is a super smart magical misdirection trick?

There is a difference between showing a card and showing your whole hand. Here is a “super smart magical misdirection trick”. A dead guy walking into a voting center and voting. Everyone would be very distracted I think. However, in the real world, a few votes here and there by a very alive chavista times a thousand could really add up.

If you ask a crook a very specific question, you will probably get a believable answer. But, the police know that if you ask a general question and let them sweat, the crook will probably hang himself trying to answer.

I have seen the vote count for many places around the world except for Cuba. I don’t expect that Capriles had many witnesses there. Who voted in Cuba? How many Cubans with Venezuelan ID cards or otherwise voted? How did it affect the final votecount?

Stephen, Where can I find the Cuba election results (either the Oct 2012 or the April 2013)? A link will be useful. I have seen April 2013 results by city taken from the actas collected by opposition witnesses overseas, but there is nothing about the Cuba vote (perhaps because there were no opposition witnesses to collect the actas?). The number of overseas votes for Capriles is very significant compared to the diffedrence; not enough to turn the result around, but certainly important if and when some of the Venezuela votes are removed during the audit due to proven irregularities. I am particularly interested in this topic because one of the overseas votes is mine!

Hey Miguel, doesn’t the finger ink kills all the arguments?. In how many mesas did we have witnesses?. Mass fraud involving many people is difficult to keep quiet. One thing is to have a couple of people doing it. Unfortunately, electronic voting always leads to conspiracy theories. Manual voting can erase all that, although you will always have people claiming that the box had a hole. Anyways, Maduro & Co. are really behaving like idiots. If there is nothing to hide they come out on top and can ridicule Capriles all they want. I just don’t get it. This pa’arrecho yo game is exhausting.

Reportedly the ink can be easily removed with cloro.
They won’t allow a recount because the truth will come out
They’ll continue to play the squirm, threaten and delay game.
They will ignore Capriles until forced by a bigger power to give in.

a) Credible opposition witnesses were present at each and every vote cast. Opposition witnesses threatned with death are not credible, votes from those centers are suspect, so we know this wasn’t the case.

b) Every voter was also inspected by a credible opposition witness prior to voting (questionable).

c) Ink cannot be removed easily (disputable).

d) Ink cannot be covered up easily (disputable).

e) There was no time in which the machines were not under direct supervision of opposition witnesses. We know opposition witnesses were locked out of some centers prior to voting, so this is a moot point anyway.

The ink is useful, it makes fraud more difficult – but not much more than that.

TV, we need real numbers not unicorn guesses. If the ink wasn’t tested we dropped the ball (again). Theoretically places were witnesses were kicked out would probably trend for Maduro. Finally, the multiple voter theory requires a lot of people to keep quiet. In Venezuela you would have to create robots for that. But hey that’s also a theory. All I have to say is remember Occam’s razor.

A method in your source code saying to optimize whenever the IP X sends the information 0 and not 1 is enough for a number of machines to do optimization based on current results and creating some variation by using the names of people. The government knows on election what centres will have oppo witnesses, you need otherwise just a couple of software developers to have done this and no one to have identified the binary code running this in those machine. No matter how many tests you do before and afterwards, the method will be activated only at the given date and when it receives the OK (which can be automated).

The only fraud possible is indeed in machines without oppo supervision directly in the vote reported, not the box itself. Sucha case would show up matching the caja. “BUT” and that’s a big “BUT” this can only be done in places without oppo witnesses. In rest, ink and witnesses kill any conspiracy theory. So two questions: In how many were we truly absent and what outcome would be needed to change the outcome. Suspicion is not proof.

Perhaps. But remember, the CNE must ensure the elections were fradulent, and dispell reasonable suspicion. It’s certainly possible that some people voted more than once, so the CNE has to demonstrate what steps were taken to prevent that and that the steps were sufficient to ensure the election result wasn’t altered due to this problem. If they can’t the election can’t be valid. The burden of proof is entirely on them.

As for people keeping quiet, you don’t need tens of thousands of people for that. You need either small groups in select voting centers to vote repeatedly in the name of people who didn’t show up, or people with multiple IDs showing up at various voting centers throughout the day. You can use both at the same time, obviously.

Voting centers where this was used wouldn’t necessarily trend Maduro. They could easily trend Caprilles, but not by as much as they otherwise would have.

I voted in London, so my case may not be representative of anything, but no matter how hard I pressed on the ink pad I only got the faintest trace of ink on my finger. When I pressed it against the paper next to my signature you could barely tell there was a mark there. “Perfect”, I was told, and given my ballot. When I left the centre a minute later the ink had completely faded from my finger.

This is not the ink that we were talking about.
After voting your little finger is dipped in a supposedly indelible ink that proves that you voted already.
We are not talking about the ink pad to leave your fiongerprint.

Ditto for me, Alberto, in Toronto. I was surprised that my thumbprint hardly registered in the cuaderno, next to my signature. I wondered if the faint inkprint was due to my having worked with cement (on a floor), days prior, cement known to rub out (temporarily?) (parts of) a fingerprint.
Now I understand that the inkpad was on the dry side. In several locations. A propósito? It would not surprise me that this was so.

In Toronto, there was no indelible ink used for dipping one’s little finger. Perhaps that’s due to the supposedly tighter controls of the voting population/procedure, outside Venezuela.

What did surprise me was when I got to the voting centre, around noon, I was told by one of the voluntarias that the voting was delayed due to the Comando Simón Bolívar getting a late start. That surprised me. I found it difficult to believe, but I didn’t question the comment any further.

The law is clear. The audit includes all the elements used in the election, plus all irregularities observed and denounced wich could lead to anulment of electoral tables. Cne must comply with the law, this is not elective. They’re obliged by the constitution and the demands of the citizens. The fascist represive actions of the regime towards the population,and Capriles, plus the delay from cne to begin audits only convices the world, never mind venezuelan, that fraud was commited, and on a larger scale that we could imagine.